Cooperative Visual Odometry

Visual odometry is defined as the process of determining the pose of a robot by processing and analyzing the images taken by the camera mounted on the robot, which is very important in robotics and computer vision. One of the most typical application of visual odometry would be autonomous robot navigation and localization.

At present the most popular and developed visual odometry mode focuses on single robot visual odometry, while more and more research are finding their way into new directions: applying active vision to path-planning process during the execution time; introducing multi-agent-system as a whole to fulfill the tasks. The intentions are: Active control of the camera can be explored to avoid ill-conditioned measurements, and if used properly can even help the system acquire better measurements used for localization; Although more complicated control and data-fusion methods are involved in multi-agent-system, through elaborate cooperation the whole system 'knows' more about the environment and multi-sensor can also reduce deterministic and stochastic errors, thus is more robust and accurate compared to only one robot.

My research falls into the area of combining these two directions together so as to obtain a more accurate localization of all the robots in this group.